Inside the Wine Cellar at Houston’s Public Services

Behind the scenes at Houston's Public Services, where Justin Vann has sought to build a meaningful bond between wine and spirits.

Located in the landmark Houston Cotton Exchange Building in downtown Houston, Public Services bills itself as a “wine & whisky” bar, and the choice of nomenclature provides a pretty good idea of what to expect.

Though at first glance, one might be inclined to view the bar as two dueling concepts living under the same roof, Vann views the project in terms of a hybrid identity. “The wine and spirits program exist together, and were created around one another,” he explains. “So we wanted to find a way to express the relationship between to these two product groups.”

On the wine front, the selections read a bit like the “greatest hits” from Vann’s previous gigs, most notably as wine director of Justin Yu’s Oxheart—one of Houston’s first natural wine destinations, where he introduced the city’s drinking public to things like pét-nat and skin-fermented white wines. While the current program at Public Services skews slightly in favor of France’s classic natural wine canon (Foillard, de Moor, Ganevat, et al.), with a smattering of Italy, Germany and Spain, it also speaks to Vann’s fascination with that movement’s nascent New World pioneers, like Australia’s cult Jauma winery and Louis-Antoine Luyt’s minimalist Chilean bottlings.

“It’s sort of my own personal playlist,” he says.

Perhaps most notable, however, is the bar’s obsession with fortified wines—especially sherry and Madeira—which are easy to read as yet another testament to Vann’s personal legacy (he’s remained one of the category’s most passionate champions over the years). But in light of Public Services’ larger identity, the serious attention given to those expressions serves a higher purpose, highlighting their intermediary status between the worlds of wine and spirits.

“To me, the fascinating thing about fortified wine is that it represents this midway point between table wine and hard liquor,” he says. “So it really excites me to think about fortified wines in the context of our large whiskey selection, and vice versa.”

This is precisely where Vann’s approach enters novel territory. In exploring the dynamics of this relationship, it occurred to him that the most intimate area of intersection between whiskey and fortified wine comes in the form of the casks they share. As a result, he deliberately organized the wine and spirits programs with this bond in mind.

“I’ve found that one of the best vehicles to teach people about fortified wines is talking about them in the context of the cask finish on whiskies,” he explains. “So something really fun we’ve started doing is collecting spirits that were aged in barrels of certain fortified wines that we offer by the glass, and pouring them side by side.”

What he’s found is that it’s one thing to discuss a whiskey’s “sherry finish” in the abstract, but another in practice. Even if customers have a general sense of the flavor profile that the cask imparts to a spirit, it’s a completely different (and far more specific) experience to take Vann’s advice and drink the Tallisker Distillers Edition, a whiskey aged in amoroso (aka cream) sherry barrels, for example, alongside an actual shot of amoroso sherry. Another favorite, he says, is pairing the Navazos Palazzi Spanish single malt whiskies, which are finished in Valdespino palo cortado casks, with a glass of the bodega’s own palo cortado sherry.

“The flavors of fortified wine pair with the flavors of whiskey so well that it just makes sense to pour them side by side,” he says. “We’ve tried some combinations that haven’t worked so well—but PX sherry with Lagavulin aged in PX barrels? Now that’s fucking incredible.”

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PUBLIC SERVICES IN FIVE BOTTLES

Capriades “Piège à Filles” Pétillant Naturel Blanc

“Capriades makes the best pét-nat in the world,” says Vann. Loire winemaker Pascal Potaire of Domaine les Capriades dedicates his entire production to the category, rather than treating it like an afterthought. A blend of chardonnay, meslier-saint-françois (a local grape similar to chenin blanc) and sauvignon blanc, the Piège à Filles blanc reveals a touch more residual sweetness than some of his other cuvées, making it dangerously easy to knock back.

Sylvain Pataille Bourgogne Aligoté

“We love Burgundy,” Vann says, “but we’re not big fans of selling the expensive stuff.” Even if the aligoté grape has lately started seeping into the mainstream, top expressions like this one—produced by Marsannay legend Sylvain Pataille and sourced from organic vines with an average age of fifty years—still offer extraordinary value, particularly in a killer Burgundy vintage like 2014.

Jauma "Like Raindrops" Grenache

Repping Australia’s nascent natural wine movement, James Erskine, owner and winemaker at Jauma in the Adelaide Hills, has been producing some of that country’s most compelling wines since 2010. Among his most celebrated creations is this juicy, sunny grenache. “We’ve been really drawn to ripe, New World expressions of natural winemaking,” says Vann. “Jauma is a good example of what we get excited about.”

D'Oliveras Colheita Tinta Negra Mole Madeira

“We love super old Madeira as much as the next wine geek, but we weren’t prepared for how much we would fall in love with the humble tinta negra mole,” Vann says of the workhorse Portuguese grape represented in this bottling. Aged for 20 years in open-air lodge attics before being bottled, it’s “one of the most complex fortified wines we serve,” according to Vann, along with the 1998 Barbeito “Ribiero Real,” produced from the same grape.

Vintage: 1995

Toro Albalá Marques de Poley Oloroso

Technically unfortified but aged in the same solera system used in the nearby sherry region, the wines of the Montilla-Moriles region manage to achieve a beautiful richness without the addition of alcohol. Produced from the Pedro Ximenéz grape (rather than the palomino fino grape used in the sherry region), this deep, expressive oloroso from Bodegas Toro Albalá averages 15 years of age, acquiring a rich nuttiness and notes of caramel that, according to Vann, tends to appeal to whiskey drinkers. “This is the sherry I pour for guests when they’ve never had a sherry before,” he says.

Zachary Sussman

Zachary Sussman is a Brooklyn-based wine writer whose work has appeared in Saveur, Wine & Spirits, The World of Fine Wine, Food & Wine and The Wall Street Journal Magazine, among many others. He was selected as the 2016 Champagne Louis Roederer Emerging Wine Writer of the Year.